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Mon/Weds 8:30-11:10, Hardie 207-08
24 January — 14 May 2007
John McVey, instructor
office hours Tues 10:00 - 11:00, or by appointment
jmcvey@montserrat.edu
617 661 4276 (home is best)
A studio/seminar investigation of the nature and practice of design as a story-telling and framing activity. Within this context, attention is devoted to episodes of design history, to the ways that history has been told, to the ways that any design tells stories about itself, and to design practice as a rhetorical activity. Participation involves research, development and presentation of ideas in seminar papers and in design exercises.
format
- readings, discussions, lectures, research/writing/design exercises
- we will get through much of Meggs, and assorted other readings
required texts
- Philip B Meggs, Alston W Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design (Fourth Edition). Wiley 2006
- Chip Kidd. The Cheese Monkeys, a novel in two semesters. Perennial 2001
- monitor trends in the design blogosphere (e.g., designobserver, voice.aiga )
themes
- definitions, doing and talking —
the role that discourse can play in design practice
read —
Ken Fitzgerald. The Resistance: Designers and Clients Go Head-to-Head. AIGA Voice. (16 Jan 07)
Michael Bierut. This is My Process. DesignObserver (9 Sep 06)
Michael Bierut. On (Design) Bullshit. DesignObserver (9 May 05)
Henry Frankfurt. "On Bullshit." Raritan 6:2 (Fall 1986) : 81-100
(reprinted as separate volume under same title by Princeton University Press in 2005.)
exercise —
Along the lines of the "word it" project at Speak Up, express a take on the issues addressed in these blog readings, and the Frankfurt article. You may do more than one.
Specifications as below :
word it
5 x 5 inches, 300 dpi, CMYK, jpg/tiff/ai
Firstname_LastName.jpg, Your name and email or website
http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/001766.html
and read —
chapters 2 (The changing role of the designer) and 15 (Design as conversation and perception) in
Bryan Lawson. How Designers Think : The Design Process Demystified (fourth edition). Oxford: Elsevier / Architectural Press, 2006
- emblems —
motto + allegorical image + explication)
Emblem-making, using borrowed components, gives us an opportunity to consider design as exploratory/investigative at one level, and communicative at another. We harness content, sometimes in very unlike units, to produce the opportunity for a viewer to engage in the work, and derive meaning, pleasure, instruction.
read Meggs, chapter 7, "Renaissance Graphic Design"
View slides and examples of modern and contemporary emblems, discuss their structure and function.
Using photo stock books (or other sources of images, such as newspaper), build three emblems (either sequence or completely separate) using the three part structure (1) motto, (2) picture, (3) explication.
Introduction and links to digitized emblem books via
emblemata
- sprezzatura —
the art that conceals its art
Sprezzatura refers to the art that hides its art, as opposed to the disclosure of "intent effort." It relates to design and to rhetoric.
The expression comes from Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (published in Venice, 1528). This was an age of texts and handbooks, and new needs to learn new skills (e.g., calligraphy). Texts proliferated, language being an important tool of self-fashioning. Artifice needed to be made seem natural.
"...and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it. And I believe much grace comes of this: because everyone knows the difficulty of things that are rare and well done; wherefore facility in such things causes the greatest wonder; whereas, on the other hand, to labor and, as we say, drag forth by the hair of the head, shows an extreme want of grace, and causes everything, no matter how great it may be, to be held in little account."
from Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (translated by Charles S. Singleton; Anchor, 1959); or see
Hoby translation (1651) ("find" "a certain Reckelessness").
Develop a visual exploration of or comment on the ideas embodied in or suggested by the expression sprezzatura, taking care to link it to design.
Poster or other format; if book-sized pages, please prepare copies for distribution to members of the class.
- nineteenth century technology —
lithographic printing
examples —
Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667-1741). Coloritto (1725). yellow red and blue the "primitive" colors.
copperplate, mezzotint; "his ability to see in every picture or object the yellow, red and blue parts that needed to be reproduced." (see Lilien, 118)
d'Agoty ca 1745, but Engelmann obtains French patent 1837 for "Lithocolore"
chromolithography —
Owen Jones. The Grammar of Ornament 1856
"From Gutenberg's time onwards, relief printers have shown a predilection for verbal messages, whereas intaglio printers, even when working commercially, have tended to concentrate on pictorial and decorative work. Lithography positioned itself between these two trades, partly out of commercial necessity, and partly because of the opportunities it offered for working with both words and pictures, often in combination with one another."
Michael Twyman. Breaking the mould: the first hundred years of lithography (The Panizzi Lectures, 2000). The British Library 2001 : p63
Nineteenth century printing technologies play a role in the emergence of graphic design as a profession
- wallpaper —
decoration, function
The urge to decorate one’s face and anything else within reach is the origin of the fine arts. It is the childish babble of painting.... A person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate.... the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use.
Adolf Loos (Ornament and Crime, 1908/1929)
Ever since wallpaper first became widely available its status has been questioned: is it background or foreground, art or decoration, vulgar or respectable, a substitute or the real thing.
Lesley Hoskins, Introduction, The Papered Wall: History, Pattern, Technique (1994)
The desire for decoration, however, appears to be a cultural constant and is, historically, one of the defining characteristics of specific cultures.
David Brett, On Decoration (1992: 3)
What shall we do with our walls?
title of book by Clarence Cook, published in 1880
Design a suite of four "domino" type decorative panels, abstract or representational, whose images continue across their borders and that can be multiplied without limit, to fill a wall.
10 inch square would work, but any repeatable shape acceptable. (These squares might be incorporated in larger composite units.)
You may design a frieze border as well, but it must be in addition to the four required panels.
Block printing, screen printing, stenciling, or even xerography may be employed.
Our design of a decorative wallpaper provides an occasion for reflection on the notion of ornament as supplemental, as something extra, and therefore either devotional or wasteful.
Ornament as supplemental to the manufactured commodity, able to differentiate it, suggest craft labor that might have (but didn't!) go into its production. In this sense, a countermove to the sprezzatura principle as applied to design. Mass production of wallpaper in the 19th century brings what had previously been a luxury (going back to tapestries) to the working class home.
read —
Adolf Loos. "Ornament and Crime" (1908), in Adolf Loos. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside CA: Ariadne Press, 1998)
Hal Foster. "Design and Crime," in Design and Crime and other Diatribes (Verso). First published in the London Review of Books, 2000
Alice Twemlow. "The Decriminalization of ornament. Spurned and marginalised for a century, decoration is enjoying a guilt-free renaissance." Eye 58 (Winter 2005) : 18-29
wallpaper (separate page)
- things —
clutter and clarity
Adolph Loos provides us with an instance of renunciation of ornament, around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. A new "sobriety" became evident — as a thread in the woof of mass media, mass production, mass consumption — at that time, that lasted well into the last century and that is inscribed in the DNA of graphic design as an independent discipline and/or profession.
Hard upon this period was the impact of the First World War, which undermined previous aesthetics and drove design — as practiced in Russia and Eastern Europe (including Germany's Bauhaus) to new conceptions of design as a utopian and socially-forward looking activity, with an emphasis on function and utility that were taken to suggest a specific functional aesthetic.
The proliferation of objects, information, media leads to efforts to manage the overload : organization of the cityscape, the page, one's life.
read —
Steve Baker. "'To go about noisily' : Clutter, Writing, and Design." Emigre 35 (Mouthpiece issue, Summer 1995)
Beatrice Warde. "The Crystal Goblet, or printing should be invisible." Address to the Society of Typographic Designers, formerly the British Typographers Guild, London, 1932. Reprinted in Looking Closer 3, Critical Writings on Graphic Design (1999)
and for Wednesday 14 March —
W A Dwiggins. "A New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design." (originally published in the Boston Evening Transcript, August 29, 1922; reprinted as Appendix B in Ellen Mazur Thomson, The Origins of Graphic Design in America 1870-1920. Yale 1997 : 184-189
Ellen Lupton. "Design and Production," in Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection (Yale 1998): 51-81 — pay particular attention to figures 2.11 and 2.12 (page 62), and the discussion of them on page 61, i.e., juxtaposition of "opaque experiments of the avant-garde and the New Typography's dream of a transparent language").
Lupton's juxtaposition of the two Schwitters spreads from Die Neue Gestaltung in der Typographie (1930), shown with spread from Jan Tschichold his Die Neue Typographie (1928) with red x across diagram of a symmetrical layout.
- fiction —
design narrations, of the fictive sort
Having read and discussed Chip Kidd his The Cheese Monkeys, a novel in two semesters. Perennial, 2001 —
Develop a final (synthetic) whole for the book.
It may be a cover, or a dustjacket and/or flipside of a dustjacket; an analytical table of contents; an index; a “finding aid.”
It may be an outline; a guide to the characters (the players); a (skeleton) syllabus, based on the novel.
It may be a quiz on the novel, with answers.
It may be a version (or versions), of one of the assignments given in Art 127, Introduction to Graphic Design — provided it presents a synthesis of the book.
It may be a glossary of terms, names (a kind of index, therefore).
Or something else.
Wednesday, 8:30 am, we look at and consider sketches.
completion Monday, 2 April
Chip Kidd website —
www.goodisdead.com
(A draft of?) his novel The Learners was serialized in USA Today in 2004 —
The Learners
Character blogs —
Winter Sorbeck
Himillsy Dodd
The Montserrat library has two monographs on Chip Kidd —
Kidd, Chip. Book one : work, 1986-2006 : album. New York : Rizzoli, 2005
NC 975.5 .K53 C4 2005
Vienne, Véronique. Chip Kidd. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2003
NC 975.5 K53 V5 2003b
Two other design fictions are —
William Addison Dwiggins. "The Five Hundred Years: A Time-Problem, and Its Solution." Print 1:1 (June 1940) : 21-33
Kenneth Fitzgerald. "The Last Wave." Emigre 54 (2000)
A huge, heretofore unseen graphic design collection was unearthed recently. No one knew where exactly it came from, or whose collection it was. The perplexed curators who stumbled upon it write in their introduction: "The reflection in the monitor was our faces of dismay, as we searched in vain for information on the materials. Among the materials we found a bound journal which we initially took for an artist's book. Its pages were densely layered with notes, images, clippings, and scraps of all kinds of printed matter. We eventually discovered that the journal outlined what may have been meant as a potential exhibition of the file's works. Left to ourselves to make sense of the materials, we eventually came to the exhibition before you. If it is the intended exhibition we can't say. And what we can say seems ludicrous."
from The Last Wave
- enlightenment and modernity —
functional design, projective design; kindergarten, the Bauhaus, Constructivists, and other utopian initiatives
Read Meggs chapters 15 and 16 — "A New Language of Form" and "The Bauhaus and the New Typography"
key names : El Lissitsky, Jan Tschichold (1902-1974), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Herbert Bayer, Eric Gill, Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and his Isotype, Piet Zwart, H. N. Werkman, Herbert Matter; also Gerd Arntz (1900-1988), Max Bill (1908-1994), Anton Stankowski (1906-1998)
- rhetoric
persuasion, written versus spoken word (Plato's Phaedrus); means to manage attention
...what is created when a rhetor (a speaker, writer, or other artist) uses skills and strategies to shape a message for a particular purpose, for a particular audience, for a particular occasion, in a particular context."
Karen M. Kuralt, in
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Rhetoric
"Rhetoric suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration."
Paul de Man, quoted in in Wei Yong-Kang, Rhetoric as collective ethos : From classical Chinese texts to postmodern corporate images. Dissertation (Rhetoric and Professional Communication), Iowa State University, 2004: p 46
"And then it dawned on me: all communication is rhetorical to a large degree. If you're not attempting to get someone to see, feel, think, or act in a particular manner, why bother communicating at all? Rhetoric, as Aristotle wrote, is "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.""
Leonard Koren. Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2003 : p24
Richard Lanham. The Economics of Attention : Style and substance in the age of information. Chicago University Press, 2006
Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett. Shaping Information : the rhetoric of visual conventions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003
- location location location —
organization and finding; describing and classifying objects
organizing for discovery not only demonstration
Finding and presentation are two poles of the information/communication spectrum; both have a role in rhetoric, yet presentation is often emphasized in rhetorical (and design) practice.
We examine commonplace books, del.icio.us, indexes, printed catalogues, dictionaries (and thesauruses), library catalogue schemes, Google Books, punctuation and page layout systems, traffic and other flow management systems (and the consequences of their absence); narrative (as storage medium); plant identifiers
"information design" — Sutnar, Lönberg-Holm and C. Theodore Larson; Sweet's Catalogue
1 april 07
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